Before the great encashening brought by mining, B and C grades were occasionally used as cheaper alternatives to the more expensive but better A grade items. Unfortunately, as cash is now much less relevant than it once was, and Engineering incentivizes focusing entirely into gear you keep forever, these grades have lost their purpose and are barely ever used.
What if instead of simply being cheaper alternatives, they were changed to compliment alternative niches? This is already the case with D-Grade, which sacrifice power for weight, only really B and C grade need alteration.
B-Grade is pretty easy. Make them be actively better(slightly; say, 3-5%) than A-Grade, but also weigh significantly more, basically the opposite of D grade. If you can handle the weight, B-Grade would be the option of choice, but they'll be so heavy, investing fully into B-Grade would often result in significantly reduced maneuverability. The player would either need to carefully engineer to ensure their weight is acceptable, or select specific gear to use that will maximize their benefit.
C-Grade is a little bit trickier. I think that Bi-Weaves give a good guide for how this could function; weaker in general, but much stronger in one specific facet. For shields, regeneration. For engines, it might have a much higher speed multiplier, but much lower optimum mass, so they can give you extremely good max speed but at the cost of maneuverability. FSD might be worse in general but enhance the power of boosts, both from injections and neutron stars. Power Distributor could be the inverse of the biweave; lower default regeneration, but MUCH higher default capacity.
And so on, and so forth.
This way, players have a choice between the different choices available, rather than always just going for A-Grade and never using the other ones. I think it could make the game more deep and interesting overall.
What if instead of simply being cheaper alternatives, they were changed to compliment alternative niches? This is already the case with D-Grade, which sacrifice power for weight, only really B and C grade need alteration.
B-Grade is pretty easy. Make them be actively better(slightly; say, 3-5%) than A-Grade, but also weigh significantly more, basically the opposite of D grade. If you can handle the weight, B-Grade would be the option of choice, but they'll be so heavy, investing fully into B-Grade would often result in significantly reduced maneuverability. The player would either need to carefully engineer to ensure their weight is acceptable, or select specific gear to use that will maximize their benefit.
C-Grade is a little bit trickier. I think that Bi-Weaves give a good guide for how this could function; weaker in general, but much stronger in one specific facet. For shields, regeneration. For engines, it might have a much higher speed multiplier, but much lower optimum mass, so they can give you extremely good max speed but at the cost of maneuverability. FSD might be worse in general but enhance the power of boosts, both from injections and neutron stars. Power Distributor could be the inverse of the biweave; lower default regeneration, but MUCH higher default capacity.
And so on, and so forth.
This way, players have a choice between the different choices available, rather than always just going for A-Grade and never using the other ones. I think it could make the game more deep and interesting overall.
